Tarek Atoui Turns Tate Modern's Turbine Hall Into a Sound Vessel

Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui has just taken over one of the most coveted spaces in contemporary art. Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui: Hold opened to the public in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London on 13 October 2026, the 11th work in the annual series. For our region it is a proud moment: a Beirut-born artist who works with sound rather than spectacle has been handed the vast former power station hall that has staged some of the best-known installations of the past decade.

So, what is it? Tate describes Hold as an immersive sonic landscape of custom-built wind instruments, percussion, electronics and sculptural objects, woven together to make an orchestra that connects the earth and sky. Above the ramp hangs a karnai, a ceremonial brass trumpet from Uzbekistan, joined by two 3D-printed horns. At the far end of the hall, drum skins, gongs, horns and textiles 20 metres long hang among a network of bamboo and shengs, the mouth organs of China and Southeast Asia, while a computer-controlled motor drives wind through them.

Interestingly, the hall plays itself. The suspended textiles, made with Satoshi Kondo, designer of ISSEY MIYAKE's women's line, are coated in conductive paint and send a low current to a synthesiser, so the bass tones shift as the fabric moves with the air currents and humidity. Microphones sample the instruments and the noise of the space, and the artist's own software reworks those sounds and plays them back as layers of the composition. The 3D-printed horns were made by the architecture studio of Arthur Mamou-Mani from a composite of sugar resin and bamboo dust, which Atoui links, in his interview with The Art Newspaper, to Tate's founder, the sugar magnate Henry Tate.

The setting draws on the artist's memories of gathering places, from vine-covered canopies to sheltered courtyards, and stones and warm lights invite visitors to sit, lie down and look up. "I see the Turbine Hall as a vessel somehow; as a sound vessel or as a space that is meant to take us somewhere else," Atoui told The Art Newspaper. "For me, it reminded me of a silo or of a big industrial space rather than a cathedral, per se." He also sees the work as quietly political: "It allows political realities to manifest in a way that is much more subtle and that is much more connected and rooted in personal and intimate experiences and stories."

Hold is also a stage. A free live programme runs in the hall from 19:00 to 20:30 on selected evenings, opening with Atoui himself alongside Emptyset, Mazen Kerbaj, Kenichi Iwasa and Aya Metwalli on 16 and 17 October. Bendik Giske and Valentina Magaletti follow on 13 November, and Nkisi and Mhmad Safa on 27 November, the same night as a free Tate Modern Late. Further evenings with the London Contemporary Music Festival on 11 December and YDP on 15 January are already announced, with more dates to come in February, March and April.

The commission is curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Senior Curator, International Art (Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational), and Dina Akhmadeeva, Curator, International Art. Readers in the Gulf may recognise Abdel Nabi's name: she selected Lebanese artist Dala Nasser for the Artist Award at the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi. "Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui: Hold creates new forms of connection through sound, bringing together diverse cultures and communities," said DooEun Choi, Art Director, Hyundai Motor Company, in a statement.

For anyone less familiar with the series, the Hyundai Commission grew out of a partnership between Tate and Hyundai Motor launched in 2014, which Tate calls the longest initial commitment from a corporate partner in its history, and which has since been extended to 2036. Previous commissions include Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019), Cecilia Vicuña's Brain Forest Quipu (2022) and El Anatsui's Behind the Red Moon (2023), and the series has drawn more than 21.6 million visitors.

Born in Beirut in 1980 and based in Paris, Atoui trained in sound art and electro-acoustic music at the French National Conservatory in Reims. His exhibitions and performances include dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel and the Serpentine Gallery in London (both 2012), the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Sharjah Art Foundation (2020), the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, in Paris (2021), MCA Sydney (2023), and Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and TBA21 in Madrid (both 2025). His work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate, the Pinault Collection and the Saradar Collection in Beirut, and in 2022 he received the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize.

Collaboration runs through all of it. The partnership with Kondo follows Atoui's performance at the Issey Miyake Spring-Summer 2026 presentation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in October 2025, and much of his practice is built with other musicians, makers and communities, so that the instruments in Hold arrive with histories of their own: the karnai above the ramp, for instance, was reused from his work for the Bukhara Biennial a year ago, The Art Newspaper reports.

The Turbine Hall piece also extends a recent line of work in which wind and weather do the playing, as in The Wind Harvesters, shown at the Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai in 2023, where instruments were set out across an open pavilion to be activated by the air and by visiting musicians.

Critics have largely been won over. In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones called the installation "rich, ingenious, funny, sad, mystical", while Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph praised "a beguiling, poetic installation". Diptyk went further, describing it as "one of the most fascinating, complex, and refreshing Tate Hyundai commissions in recent years."

Perhaps what is most significant here is the kind of attention it asks for. In a hall built for scale, an artist from our region has chosen intimacy: a space to sit, listen and gather, shaped by memories of courtyards and shared shade. It is a reminder that some of the most compelling voices from the MENA region and its diaspora are working far beyond the image.

We can't wait to hear how the hall sounds by April.

Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui: Hold is on view in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, from 13 October 2026 to 11 April 2027. Entry is free.

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